The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  It becomes clear that this is a choreographed tribute, the girls having decided that they would take turns addressing Hayley as if she were right there in the room. Each reads her brief, perfect words, then steps back to allow the next friend to step forward.

  “Haze, I’ll never forget the weekend the eight of us went up to Vermont. You told us you’d have to drive up later and meet us because you were busy that afternoon. We later found out you were busy because you were being publicly recognized for your remarkable contribution to the MS cause. You didn’t even tell us.”

  This is another kind of community, the community of a school, coming together to help, shoring up the crumbled foundation of one of their own. A girl with a daisy tucked into her blond hair, her voice shaky, her eyes bright: “Hayley, we will always feel the magic of your wild side, a side we wish everyone could have encountered. This past year, our senior year, we lived life. I mean, we really lived life. No moment taken for granted, and we spent little time apart. Whenever we gathered, fun was inevitable, whether we were outside in the grass, taking road trips on the weekends, or even in the library. The music never stopped, and our crazy times will never be forgotten. This was the best year of our lives, and we have…no…regrets.”

  A girl in a satin dress and a lock of hair over her right eye, who sniffles after each sentence and looks up at Bill every few words, as if she had written this so he especially could hear it: “Now, as we go ahead in life, we carry your light with us, and with hope, spread the spirit that reigned so vibrantly within that beautiful heart of yours.”

  The sixth speaker, a tall girl with brown hair pulled back and a glittering black necklace: “Reflecting upon our years as best friends, you have been more to me than I could have ever imagined. I can only hope that I gave you half as much as you gave me. I am truly blessed to have had you and your wonderful family in my life. I love you, Hayley.”

  The last girl steps up and speaks with calm and clarity, a kind of fullness: “You are our best friend. Our miracle. You are our rock. We love you more with each breath we take and each step that leads us forward.”

  This group of friends was known around Miss Porter’s as the Eight. The seven remaining girls make their way back to their seats.

  —

  We rarely talk about the people in our lives this way when they’re alive. It is the ritual of death, to stand before the gathered and talk about the memories we hope to carry with us but that we know will never again be as crisp and real as they are at this moment. To eulogize. This service is an onslaught of memories. They beat you down and lift you up at the same time. Beat you down because they’re all in the past. Lift you up because they exist at all.

  Bill looks over and gives his friend Steve Hanks a little nod.

  Here goes.

  Hanks helps Bill up to the podium, a hand on his elbow to steady him. Four thousand people suck in quick whispers of air as they watch in disbelief the doctor lumber to the front of the stage. Bill buttons the top two buttons of his unfamiliar suit jacket, pats his breast pocket to find the folded copy of his remarks. Hanks twists open a plastic water bottle for him and adjusts the mike. Bill has lost so much blood and so much family, and everyone is staring at him, and he feels as if he were in another man’s body. His new shoes feel strange and the stage is foreign under his feet. You can see the wound on his forehead from the farthest row of seats. Hanna, Ron, Glenn, his parents—everybody is praying that Bill won’t drop to the floor right there in Welte Hall. Everyone would understand.

  He doesn’t drop to the floor. He stands up as straight as he can, takes a deep breath, and speaks for twenty-two minutes. Right away he makes the four thousand people laugh. He brings up his first date with Jennifer that night in Pittsburgh, when he invited his parents to come along and his dad paid. “I was a cheap date, but I’ve been paying for it ever since,” he says. He tells the crowd that he ended up at St. Mary’s this week rather than the hospital he was affiliated with, the Hospital of Central Connecticut, because St. Mary’s was closer to his home, “but everybody there was beautiful and angels to me and I knew I had to get out for the services, but it did feel safe.” He pauses for a few seconds, staring ahead, off script, as if reckoning with a thought. He bobs his head back and forth a little. “Part of me wanted to hide there, and not face things—” His voice begins to crack.

  He constantly touches his head. He brushes a hank of hair off his wound, or taps his forehead, or slides a light hand over the cuts in the back of his scalp. The overwhelming energy in his body, finding its way out through his fingers.

  “KK Rosebud.” He turns around and looks at Michaela’s four-foot smiling visage over his shoulder. He talks about her cooking—the balsamic vinaigrette she made just last Sunday. How he used to have to watch basketball games on the tiny upstairs TV if she had dibs on the “clicker” and wanted to watch the Food Network. He does an imitation of her walking around staring at the floor in shyness, his shoulders hunched over, his eyes looking straight down. “But once you got to her, you’d get that smile, and once you had the smile, you knew you were in,” he says. He recalls how one day she came home from school crying. “I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and it was because, when they were getting changed for gym”—he turns and gestures again to her photo. “She’s tall and lanky now, but back then she was a little pudgy, and one of the little skinny dwarf girls”—and here he smiles, and the crowd laughs big. Not a nervous, funeral laugh but a hearty, genuine laugh. “That’s what we called them together. They poked her tummy, KK’s tummy, and said, ‘What’s that?’ And KK was sad. But she had just grown out of it. And maybe it was that that made her stick up for other kids who were getting picked on.”

  He doesn’t talk about evil. He doesn’t talk about sorrow. For twenty-two minutes he talks only about his girls, about their lives, their accomplishments, the little things they did that made him feel lucky. He tells stories.

  If Jennifer’s father, the Reverend Hawke, was reserved in his delivery and if he showed an unbelievable composure at this moment and on this occasion, Bill Petit’s comportment in front of an auditorium full of mourners can only be described as a small miracle. The Yankee reserve of Petit’s people is the stuff of cultural caricature, but in this instance, Yankee reserve becomes a man’s salvation. From his boyhood, he’d been taught that one doesn’t complain, and one doesn’t indulge the emotions of self-pity or engage in operatic displays of feeling. And so disciplined had he been in the quality of his reserve that Bill Petit, upon experiencing a horror most unimaginable, does not even possess the vocabulary to vilify, or destroy. His instinct is not to turn the attention to his own suffering—to ask Why me?—because that has not been a part of his emotional education. The contemporary vogue for public soul-searching and pop psychologizing is as alien to Bill Petit as setting foot on Mars.

  He only has words of love. For nearly a week he has been more dead than alive. But he’s come here, has struggled to his feet, to tell the assembled that he will spend the rest of his life remembering. And to tell them something else: that he will live in their memories. He will never be released from this, and yet he will live.

  At the end, he draws a deep breath, and with his voice faltering and his eyes focused down at the podium, says, “I guess if there’s anything to be gained from the senseless deaths of my beautiful family, it’s for us to all go forward with the inclination to live with a faith that embodies action—help a neighbor, fight for a cause, love your family.” He looks up at the four thousand people. “I’m really expecting all of you to go out and do some of these things with your family in your own little way, to spread the work of these three wonderful women. Thank you.”

  And the four thousand people rise to their feet and clap for more than a minute.

  I understand I’m on the road

  Where all that was is gone.

  So where to now, St. Peter?

  Show me which road I’m on.

  —Elton John, “Wher
e to Now St. Peter?,” from Tumbleweed Connection, one of Bill Petit’s favorite albums

  EXISTENCE

  Summer 2007–Summer 2010

  A FEW GUYS at the country club had called or e-mailed Ron to ask what they could do to help. Some other friends, too, guys who knew Bill and knew that Ron would be the point man with the family. That’s how it started.

  Ron first needed to get through the memorial service, but now he starts to call and e-mail guys back and tell them to come to the club next Thursday after work, around six o’clock. That evening, Ron gets there a little early. He walks upstairs to a colonial-style dining room, summer sun blasting through the towering windows. Outside, the temperature still hovers around 90 even as the sun falls. He doesn’t know how many guys will show up, how many of them will be able to take time on a weeknight. Maybe a dozen. But when he gets up to speak on this Thursday night in August after work, there must be fifty men in the room.

  A man who’s been through what Bill has been through should never have to see a funeral bill, Ron tells them. So I thought we might try to get a little money together to pay for the funeral, he says.

  Also, Ron points out, Bill has no clothes. He has no shoes. He doesn’t have a belt, a pair of socks, a T-shirt. Ron proposes they all chip in a little extra money to help buy him new clothes, maybe at the club’s pro shop—just enough to get him started. And there will be other little expenses that Bill shouldn’t have to worry about, so maybe if there’s anything left over, they could put it toward other stuff.

  “We should just help him out,” Ron says.

  It’s not that Bill doesn’t have any money, Ron tells the men. He just shouldn’t have to worry. Shouldn’t have to deal with any of it, you know? It’s not going to be tax-deductible or anything, he says. But we have a man down.

  The men nod.

  Within five days, Ron collects $77,000.

  —

  Moments like that should not be mistaken for examples of “the good that can come out of this,” Ron will say later. It’s not some silver lining. But when generosity shows itself the way it did at the country club that night, it reminds you that people are basically good, he says. That simple notion—that people are basically good—was difficult to believe in as the rain fell on the afternoon ten days earlier when word started to spread around the state of Connecticut, around America, even around the world that two of us, two human beings, had broken into a house where four other human beings lived, tortured them, and savagely killed three of them. Left the fourth for dead. It was grisly, and when you heard the news, it made you feel grim and afraid.

  But you talk about community, Ron says. You talk about the good that people can do? Five different guys came up to Ron after the meeting and said, Ron, if you’re short, just let me know what the number is. Not all these guys are even best pals with Bill and Ron—not by a long shot. But they are like him. They have families, and they work like dogs to afford a nice life for their wives and kids in a nice part of a nice state, and they play golf on Saturdays to relieve some of the stress. They are a club. They can’t imagine what it’s like for Bill, and don’t want to. So they are doing the only thing they can think of.

  These men with their checkbooks pay for the entire funeral. They buy Bill enough new clothes to get him going again. They give some money to the man who had chartered a plane to fly up Jen’s parents. Which reminds Ron that Dick and Marybelle need to get home. He doesn’t call the same guy; he calls another guy who Ron thinks might also have a plane. This guy doesn’t know Bill very well—they met maybe once, played a friendly round of golf against each other in a tournament. But Ron tracks him down, gets him on the phone. Explains the situation. And the guy sends the plane himself to pick up the Hawkes and take them home to Pennsylvania. Ron is amazed. He says, What do we owe you? I’ve got some money here in a fund, the guys really came together. What’s the cost?

  The man says, Don’t be ridiculous.

  —

  Bad things happen to everyone. And in their aftermath, it is the human instinct to adapt and survive. By and large, people want to live. Biology and human history and our own lives tell us that we are indeed a resilient little bug.

  But there is bad, and then there is depraved.

  When your family is murdered and the home you made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead, it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life—waking up, walking, talking—become alien tasks, an almost impossibly heavy weight to lift from moment to moment. You are more dead than alive.

  People around Bill, and around the state, even, are starting to ask one another, Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

  Bill has stayed at his parents’ house on Red Stone Hill since the Friday night of the funeral. Since he got out of the hospital. He lives there now. His own home on Sorghum Mill Drive stands only as a wooden shell surrounded by grass on a quarter acre of earth, fifteen miles away. Plywood covers the windows. Smoke stains mar the siding above them. Inside, many of the rooms are gutted. Others look eerily intact except for a film of soot covering everything. The sunporch, off the back, is a hollow black box.

  It is not his home anymore.

  He stays in a second-floor bedroom in his parents’ house, near the top of the stairs, and spends a lot of time lying on a queen-size four-poster bed, not sleeping. Hanna and Abby have gone to the mall and bought him underwear and shoes and socks, and there were the clothes from the guys at the club—it’s amazing what people do for you. The kindnesses.

  In addition to Bill Sr. and Barbara, Bill’s grandmother, Gram Triano, his mother’s mother, lives in the house on Red Stone Hill, too, so there are four of them there. Bill knows every inch of the house but has never lived in it. Each night before he goes to bed, he sets the alarm system. But that doesn’t feel like enough to him, so he props a chair-back under the knob of each door to the outside. This isn’t so much for his own safety—at this point, he’s not convinced he wants to be alive anyway. But his instinct has always been to protect, and it’s all he can think of to do to keep his parents’ home sacred and unmolested, as his was for so many years, as most people’s are for their entire lives. And so he locks down the house against the forces of evil that have been visited upon him.

  At first he sleeps maybe an hour, hour and a half a night. He lies awake mostly, thinking about the same questions. Working slowly and without rest, he is building ramparts around his mind to keep out the what-ifs, because the what-ifs are driving him insane. What if that lock on the bulkhead door had been working properly? That’s how they got in, from the backyard. Why hadn’t he fixed it? The haunting questions break through constantly, and he has to try to beat them away. What if the latch on the kitchen door that led down to the basement had been locked? A hundred thousand what-ifs. What if he had heard the men approaching him as he slept on the sunporch and woken up? What if the police had stormed the house five minutes sooner? You just have to swallow hard and breathe, and sometimes the questions go away for a few minutes. But they always come back.

  Bill is trying to rebuild his body, but he can’t sleep and thus has little strength. He is bleary all the time, burned out every minute. Beyond exhaustion. During the first few months, the days are bad enough, but at night the nasty darkness covers everything outside, and that’s when bad things happen. He doesn’t know how much longer he can endure the nights. Three o’clock in the morning. That’s around the time the men broke in and his world began to collapse around him. Now it doesn’t matter if he falls asleep at 2:45 or if he hasn’t fallen asleep at all. At 3:00 a.m. he bolts up and his mind is suddenly back in the hallucinatory panic of that night, the macabre march of horrors unfurling in his uncontrolled imagination even as he sits in the safe peace of his parents’ house. His heart starts pounding, the adrenaline sends him to shaking. He sweats. The minutes that made up the seven-hour ordeal roil around
in his head, all mixed up—the minutes as he lived them compounded by what he has since learned about what was happening to Jennifer and the girls while he was tied up in the basement.

  But even worse, if it is possible to get worse than that, is the moment when he wakes up from what little sleep he manages to get. His punishment for sleeping is a cruel flash of peace, when his eyes pop open and he wonders, for a fraction of a second, if it might all have been a bad dream.

  —

  For months afterward, there are people at the house constantly. Fifty to a hundred a day, from eight in the morning until ten o’clock at night. The driveway can probably hold twenty cars, and it seems like it’s always at least half full. Relatives, friends, people bringing food, because that’s what people tend to bring when they don’t know what else to bring: money or food. The amount of food that’s coming through the front door is overwhelming. The grocer in town is an old family friend—most of the town, people joke, are old family friends of the Petits—and he has so many orders coming in for the house that he finally calls Barbara and asks if she wants him to space out the deliveries so things don’t spoil. Yes, please, she says.

  Bill keeps thinking how lucky he is to have this family and all these friends. A lot of people, something like this happens, they have no one to help them. He looks at the newspaper sometimes, or the television news—not often, but a glance here and there. And he sees the steady stream of reports of soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The months and years after his own tragedy are some of the bloodiest in those two wars, and Bill just thinks how lucky he is not to live in a place where there are car bombs and IEDs and innocent children getting blown up in the streets. This is how his mind is working right now, searching for the logic in his own survival, seeking justification for his own existence.